God in Conflict: Images of the Divine Warrior in Ancient Jewish and Early Christian TextsO worship the King all-glorious above is another well-know and frequently-sung hymn that draws deeply on the divine warrior tradition.
In the ancient world, writers routinely appealed to martial motifs to express their beliefs and hopes related to the divine. Texts from the ancient Near East depict deities in conflict with one another over the rightful rule of the cosmos. Documents among the Hebrew Bible, which arose out the ancient Near Eastern context, continued to adapt images of divine conflict when describing the God of Israel; Jewish authors, however, showed much creativity in bending and shaping the traditional motifs for their rhetorical and theological purposes. This adaptation of divine war images endured into the first century CE among New Testament authors, who incorporated the person and work of Jesus Christ into traditional conflict motifs. This essay offers a brief overview of some key images and texts from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament that framed God as a warrior; it also gestures toward the varieties of ways authors expressed the hope that God would fight for God’s people, defeat their adversaries, and restore the chosen people.
See Also: Scott C. Ryan, Divine Conflict and the Divine Warrior: Listening to Romans and Other Jewish Voices, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019).
By Scott C. Ryan
Assistant Professor of Religion and Biblical Studies
Department of Humanities
Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina
October 2019
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